Mesomeric Tuning At Bi Centres & The Reuse Of A Waste Product From Cage Synthesis

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a great interest in using the main group elements to do transition metal-like chemistry. Our research group installs ancillary ligands onto heavy main group elements, forcing them to adopt non-VSEPR geometries and enabling new, useful reactivity. The first half of this thesis will investigate the use of a new class of tuneable tridentate ligands to see how substituent bulk affects structure and reactivity of the resulting bismuth compounds.

This thesis will also address the issue of chemical waste. Synthetic chemistry has made major improvements to our life over the past century, yet the reactions used to make said products often produce by-products. In the second part of this thesis, we will examine methods used to turn a waste product from our lab’s polymer chemistry into an N-centered electrophile and a weakly coordinating cation, both of which we hope will be useful synthetic reagents.